Opinion: A long history of collective struggle in Maine’s restaurant industry / by Andy O’Brien

_{^{Photo: Corey Templeton | Creative Commons via Flickr}}

_{Originally published in the Beacon: https://mainebeacon.com/}

High staff turnover rates in restaurants also make it difficult to maintain worker power to establish organizing committees and maintain it through the long drawn out process of getting workers to sign union cards, winning the secret ballot election and negotiating a contract, as employers often drag their feet until a year passes and they can run a decertification campaign. Employers will also exploit divisions between dining room and kitchen staff.

It has been deeply inspiring to witness the efforts of workers at Starbucks in Biddeford and Chipotle in Augusta to organize their workplaces in an industry that is notorious for low wages and a difficult work environment. But as these union drives have shown, corporations will go to extreme lengths to stop employees from organizing, including firing organizers and closing the business in blatant violation of our weak labor laws.

As of 2020, the food service industry had one of the lowest unionization rates of any sector in the US — just 1.2%, compared to 10.8% of all wage and salary workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s why it’s so impressive that food service workers in Maine and across the country are winning union elections against all odds. But this isn’t the first time restaurant workers in Maine have risen up and organized and it certainly won’t be the last.

A History of Struggle

As early as the 1890s, Maine restaurant and hotel workers began organizing and forming worker organizations known as “labor and benefit” orders, according to labor historian Charlie Scontras. In 1919, members of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ International Alliance and Bartenders’ International League of America (HERE) established locals in Augusta and Portland. Then in 1928, the Portland local brought HERE’s international president, Edward Flore, and an organizer to the city where they were reportedly “met with good success, adding several new houses to the fair list and strengthening the Local.”

Two years later, in 1930, the Portland Central Labor Union, a precursor to the Southern Maine Labor Council, funded an organizer to help establish a HERE local, but it failed to survive “due to the lack of interest in this class of workers.”

However, union activity in Maine dramatically increased with the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which created the fundamental right of workers to organize, and the Maine State Federation of Labor (MSFL), a precursor to the Maine AFL-CIO, successfully convinced HERE to send another organizer. The Teamsters in Portland even passed a resolution at that time refusing to patronize non-union restaurants in the city.

The main driving force for organizing efforts in the 1930s was that wages were incredibly low and Maine still didn’t have a minimum wage law. Jesse W. Taylor, Maine’s Commissioner for Labor and Industry, observed in 1939 that many workers in restaurants and other female-dominated industries in Maine earned just $5 a week ($106 adjusted for inflation) for 54 to 64 hours of work. At the very least, Taylor argued that the state should establish a 25-cent per hour minimum wage law for women and minors.

The Federal Fair Labor Standards Act didn’t cover restaurant workers, and Maine was one of the last states in New England to pass a minimum wage law in 1959, but it still didn’t cover restaurant servers.

Just like today, wage theft and blacklisting were very common in the restaurant industry. Taylor pointed to one case where a restaurant owner refused to pay a young woman who worked 72 hours in one week because, the employer argued, she was leaving the job.

“We had proof she had worked over time. The books at the restaurant can be checked,” said Taylor. “She went in court and testified. It cost the employer $36 in court and she was blacklisted and could not get a job anywhere in the city. Violations have been going on elsewhere. They would like to go to court, but do not dare to.”

Speaking to the MSFL Convention in 1954, Maine’s Labor Commissioner lamented the state’s failure to pass minimum wage legislation and said that workers didn’t come out and testify in support of it in great numbers because they were likely afraid of losing their jobs.

HERE continued to support union organizing drives throughout the 1950s, but the anti-union legal system unfortunately chilled the momentum. In 1954, workers established HERE Local 390 at Theodore’s Lobster House in Portland (later DiMillo’s Lobster House) which led to a court injunction banning picketing of the establishment that was later upheld by the Maine Supreme Court. This blatant suppression of free speech ignited the labor movement to demand a state level Labor Relations Act to protect restaurant, hotel and retail workers, who were not covered under federal labor laws.

At the 1954 MSFL convention, workers claimed that the Portland Chamber of Commerce had even sent letters “asking all restaurants apparently to keep labor organizations away from their doors.” The convention voted to drop Portland from its list of recommended convention sites in 1956 in solidarity with restaurant workers.

One HERE worker organizer in Portland noted that restaurant workers earned as low as 22 cents an hour and that the Eastland Hotel even imposed “fines” on workers that “sometimes completely consumes the weekly pay.” In a letter to a state legislator in 1965, the organizer wrote:

“The State of Maine is called ‘Vacationland.’ A vacationland needs tourists and these tourists need accommodations. We, the workers of the Hotel and Restaurant Industry provide the services needed for these accommodations. Yet, we are the most sorely neglected citizens of this state. We work a 54-hour week for as little as $.25, $.35, and $.50 cents an hour.

Are we not as good citizens of our country as they are? Must we receive less pay because we work in Maine? Because of a few who have the financial power … must we remain 65 years behind the rest of the country?”

In the late 1970s, there was another resurgence of organizing in the restaurant industry. As one supporter of the unionization effort wrote in Maine Labor News:

“Would you like to work for exactly one half the legal minimum wage? Would you like overtime being at 46 rather than 40 hours per week? Would you like to work on a piecework system largely at the mercy of supervisors who play favorites?

Would you like to be sent home without pay because there isn’t ‘enough work’ on your shift without compensation? Would you like to have no pension plan, no medical benefits, no paid holidays or sick pay? If you enjoy the terms of such employment you could work for a job as a waitress or waiter anywhere in the state.

Would you like to sink hundreds of dollars into an education at a trade school in culinary arts only to find that you are not making enough money on the Job after graduation to pay for your education?

Would you like to wash dishes, clean motel rooms, scour pots, or bus tables for $2.30 an hour? If you have answered ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, you, too, could qualify for work in the hotel or restaurant business.”

The most successful union drive of the 1970s was on August 3, 1977 when servers, bartenders and kitchen staff at the Roundhouse Motor Inn in Auburn voted to form a union with HERE. In the 1980s, it was sole unionized restaurant in the state and union workers often patronized it, including holding meetings there during the International Paper Strike of ’87-88.

However, workers trying to organize the Portland Red Coach Grille and Convention Center in 1976 faced much more difficult odds after the business fired a lead organizer, setting off a year of unfair labor practice complaints, appeals, staff turnover and rampant union busting that culminated in a defeat for the union. With the anti-union climate of the 1980s and 90s, it wasn’t until the 21st century that restaurant workers briefly began organizing again with the establishment of the Southern Maine Workers Center in the mid 2000s.

But given the increasing passion of restaurant workers for collective action in the 2020s, perhaps we can look forward to patronizing more unionized restaurants and hotels in Maine in the near future!

Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on the Maine AFL-CIO’s blog. Most of the information in this article was gathered from the book “Maine Labor in the Age of Deindustrialization and Global Markets: 1955 – 2005” by Charles Scontras.

_{Andy O’Brien is the communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO, a statewide federation of 160 local unions representing 40,000 workers. However, his opinions are his own and don’t represent the views of his employer. He is also a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445.}

_{Beacon, August 11, 2022, https://mainebeacon.com/}

Maine News: With Redbank purchase, housing advocates warn of rise of corporate landlords in Maine / by Dan Neumann

_{^{Photo: A two-unit residence at Redbank Village in South Portland from the complex’s website.}}

_{Originally published in the Beacon on July 26, 2022}

A few months after property management firm JRK Property Holdings of Los Angeles took over Redbank Village, a 500-unit apartment complex in South Portland where some tenants pay subsidized rent, they began sending out notices that rent would be going up.

JRK is a large corporate landlord with a portfolio of over 80,000 units across 30 states. The firm has been accused of several practices that large rental companies often use to maximize their profits, including hiking rents, displacing long-term tenants through evictions, and tenant harassment.

Housing advocates warn that this growing category of landlord has made displacing tenants part of their business model.

“The corporate consolidation of housing is really the greatest threat to the housing market today,” said Katie Goldstein, the director of housing campaigns for the Center for Popular Democracy. “We’re seeing corporate landlords who are responsible to investors to return as much profit as possible. The way to do that is through evictions, tenant turnover, raising rents and reducing services.”

She added, “Corporate landlords are able to buy up huge swathes of properties and units. That’s why you have a Los Angeles company buying up properties in Maine. They’re really looking for places that have weak tenant protections to extract as much profit as possible.”

In May, JRK began notifying Redbank residents that it would be raising rents in 2023 up to $2,400 per month, which represented as much as a 35% increase for some tenants who, just five years ago, reported paying $750 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. JRK also began eviction proceedings, threatening to make some residents homeless as rents and housing prices across Maine continue to climb.

This prompted the South Portland City Council to step in. In June, the council initially planned an eviction ban and rent freeze. However, they struck a deal with JRK for a 10% year-to-year rent increase cap. Now, residents are calling for a longer-term solution.

“How many people can afford a 10% increase every year?” asked Lado Ladoka, a leader of the Maine Immigrant Housing Coalition. Ladoka has been meeting with several Redbank residents who are recent immigrants.

While large corporate landlords are nothing new in Maine, they have taken over an alarmingly large share of the rental market across the country since the 2008 foreclosure crisis.

For Ladoka and other housing advocates, the growth of corporate landlords pose a unique threat to a worsening affordable housing crisis in Maine, where policymakers continue to grapple with a shortage of about 20,000 affordable housing units with an estimated 27,000 Maine households on the waitlist for Section 8 vouchers.

“The issue facing Redbank tenants is not new nor will it be the last,” Ladoka warned.

Corporate landlords evict, raise rents more than average

Redbank was built in 1942 as a federal public housing project but has been in private hands since 1956 while maintaining a percentage of its units to be affordable for low-income Mainers. About 50 of the complex’s units are home to residents who pay a portion of their rent with support from Section 8 vouchers.

In November, JRK paid $110 million for Redbank and Liberty Commons, a six-building apartment complex in South Portland with 120 units. Both properties were previously owned by Portland Portfolio II LLC, an entity controlled by Jones Street Investment Partners, a Boston-based real estate firm backed by private equity.

JRK’s website for Liberty Commons advertises “Multi-million dollar renovation — coming soon!” As the Center for Popular Democracy’s Goldstein explained, corporate landlords often justify rent increases through upgrades whose costs they pass onto tenants. Others tools for squeezing profits from renters include increasing fines and fees for things like parking, utilities, late rent payments, or pets. At Redbank, JRK justified its initial call for a 35% increase by alleging rising labor costs and the need for a storage shed. The company said they have plans to spend $6 million to repair and upgrade the property.

While rents are on the rise nationally, growing 5% in May, tenants of large corporate landlords have frequently faced even higher rent and fee increases. They also have faced higher rates of eviction. A recent 15-year study in Boston found that large landlords evicted tenants of single-family homes at two to three times the rate of smaller landlords.

JRK is no exception. In 2020, the company agreed to pay their Washington tenants $350,000 to settle a lawsuit for violating that state’s eviction moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“JRK Residential unfairly and deceptively pressured residents to pay outstanding rent by sending numerous threatening emails and notices, sometimes multiple times per day, and making harassing phone calls to tenants or tenants’ workplaces,” read a release from Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

Media reports also reveal complaints made against JRK in Texas, Colorado and California for maintenance delays or neglect, including lack of air conditioning, water leaks and mold.

The need for stronger renter protections

The rise of large corporate landlords stems from the financialization of the economy that accelerated after the 2008 recession and bled into the rental housing market, explains Mathilde Lind Gustavussen, a PhD candidate in sociology at the Free University of Berlin who researches housing and displacement.

“The post-2008 era has seen the increasing consolidation of rental housing into corporate hands — not just through well-known conglomerates like Blackstone Group and American Homes 4 Rent — but also through smaller investment firms backed by private equity, including investment banks, hedge funds, college endowments, insurance companies, and pension funds,” she wrote in Jacobin in June. “The foreclosure crisis entrenched global finance’s colonization of residential real estate, focused initially on single-family homes but expanding eventually into multifamily rentals.”

Goldstein said the Center for Popular Democracy and its affiliates are trying to organize the tenants of corporate landlords into an organization called Renters Rising to push federal, state and local policymakers for protections.

“We see the solutions as universal rent control and tenant protections and also mass investment in social housing,” she said. “We really need to have government step in to protect tenants from corporate landlords. It’s only going to get worse if we don’t do something really major and transformative.”

Ladoka worries that state and local policy makers in Maine are not up to the task of meeting these powerful economic forces head on. He believes local officials should have never let the formerly federally-subsidized Redbank Village fall into the hands of a corporate landlord, particularly as a major goal for Maine lawmakers is to build new affordable housing.

“It is something we knew very well yet turned a blind eye to,” he said. “My frustration comes when city leadership knows very well these mortgages are about to expire and they do nothing about it and allow those properties to turn into market-rate rentals. Why can’t we retain what is already in the public domain and keep it in the public domain?”

The South Portland City Council is currently working on a rent stabilization ordinance regulating year-to-year increases. The ordinance has reportedly prompted pushback from some landlords and corporate lobbyists.

Ladoka has been urging Redbank residents and other renters in South Portland to push the city council to pass much needed policies like rent control, banning application fees and barring “no cause” evictions.

“We have to be on our toes to ensure that their policy is right,” he said. “Corporate America doesn’t want us to be in the room when these policies are being decided. If working families are not at the table then they will be eaten for lunch.”

_{Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com.}

Maine News: Chipotle shuts down Augusta restaurant amid unionization campaign / by Evan Popp

_{^{Photo: Workers at the Augusta Chipotle | Courtesy Maine AFL-CIO}}

_{Originally published in the Beacon on July 19, 2022}

Workers at a Maine-based Chipotle argue the corporate fast-food chain is engaging in union-busting after the company announced Tuesday it is closing the Augusta restaurant where employees filed to form a collective bargaining unit.

On Tuesday, Lisa Zeppetelli of the Chipotle northeast region corporate office informed workers that the Augusta restaurant at 1 Stephen Drive would be permanently closing, effective that day. In the message, Zeppetelli claimed that while the company had spent considerable time and resources on the store, “we don’t have management necessary to reopen.” The store originally closed temporarily in June after employees expressed concerns about staffing levels.

Workers rallied Tuesday afternoon in protest of the decision to permanently close the restaurant, urging Chipotle to reverse the decision. In a news release announcing that protest, employees at the restaurant said the timing of the closure is revealing. Last month, a majority of workers at the Augusta restaurant filed to form a union — a first among Chipotle workers nationwide — called Chipotle United. That came after employees protested working conditions at the restaurant by walking off the job earlier in June, arguing that persistent understaffing and a lack of training was creating an unsafe environment.

“This is union busting 101 and there is nothing that motivates us to fight harder than this underhanded attempt to shut down the labor movement within their stores,” Chipotle United member Brandi McNease said of the company’s decision to close the Augusta restaurant. “They’re scared because they know how powerful we are, and if we catch fire like the unionization effort at Starbucks they won’t be able to stop us.”

McNease added that the company waited until the morning of a hearing to determine the next steps for the union election to announce that the store would be shut down.

“Since we announced our intent to unionize, they’ve tried to bully, harass and intimidate our crew to prevent them from exercising their right to have a collective voice on the job,” she said. “But we remain united, our solidarity is strong and we won’t bend. We are sticking together and our customers have our backs. We are fighting this decision and we are building a movement to transform the fast food industry and ensure the workers who create all the wealth for these corporations are respected and no longer have to struggle to support their families.”

McNease pointed out that Chipotle gave its CEO a massive bonus in 2020, arguing that the claim the company couldn’t bring in enough workers to keep the Augusta restaurant open doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. She said Chipotle has the money to “attract workers and pay them living wages” if the company wanted to.

In her email to workers on Tuesday, Zeppetelli said workers will be paid for any scheduled shifts through July 24 and will receive four weeks severance based on hours they worked over the past two weeks. Chipotle benefits will continue through July 30 and workers can keep getting benefits through the COBRA program for a period of time, she said. The company also pledged to assist workers in finding another job.

In a statement to Beacon, Laurie Schalow, chief corporate affairs officer at Chipotle, reiterated the arguments made by Zeppetelli in her email, writing that the company went to “extraordinary lengths to try to staff the restaurant, including deploying two recruiting experts dedicated to this one restaurant.” However, she said those efforts were unsuccessful and that the staffing issues meant reopening the restaurant wouldn’t be profitable. Schalow did not address a question about whether Chipotle was attempting to bust the workers’ union.

The announcement that the Augusta store will be shut down comes as the effort to unionize Chipotle workers has spread. The organizing committee for the Augusta restaurant union said it has received communications from employees at other Chipotles in Maine and around the country asking for advice on forming a collective bargaining unit. And earlier this month, workers at a Chipotle in Michigan also filed to form a union.

Such efforts are part of a labor movement that has shown renewed strength in Maine and across the country. Organizers have recently won union elections at an Amazon warehouse and myriad Starbucks locations as workers seek to force companies to treat employees better, pay them a higher wage and put in place additional protections amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

_{Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com}

Maine climate activists condemn Supreme Court ruling limiting power of EPA / by Dan Neumann

_{^{Photo: Climate justice rally in Augusta. | Courtesy of 350 Maine}}

Maine climate activists condemned a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday that severely limits the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to combat climate change and has broader implications for federal authority.

“This case is really about coal companies’ radical agenda to try and save themselves,” said Ania Wright, an organizer with Sierra Club Maine. “Coal companies and far-right politicians want the Supreme Court to gut the Clean Air Act and return to the legal framework that we had before the 1970s.”

In the 6-3 decision on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the conservative-majority Supreme Court sided with a block of states led by West Virginia that preemptively sought to block the Biden administration from setting standards that are likely to result in a shift away from coal plants and toward those powered by cleaner energy sources.

At the heart of the case was the Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration policy to force power plants to bring down carbon emissions that was first proposed by the EPA in 2014. But the CPP never actually went into effect. It was stopped by the courts and abandoned by the Trump administration and President Joe Biden never brought it back.

Coming on the heels of other far-right decisions by the court on abortion, guns and the separation of church and state, Thursday’s ruling was seen as particularly extreme as it has the potential to severely constrain the executive branch from responding to climate change and other problems.

“Instead of empowering the EPA to clean up deadly toxins, this radical Supreme Court has granted another giveaway to corporate polluters at the expense of human health and the preservation of our communities,” Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree said in a statement after the ruling. “Make no mistake: this decision will set us back years in the fight against climate change.”

Around the country, climate activists condemned the ruling and the court as illegitimate.

“A Supreme Court that sides with the fossil fuel industry over the health and safety of its people is anti-life and illegitimate,” the youth-led Sunrise Movement tweeted.

“Minority rule in the United States is a threat to life on earth,” tweeted Kate Aronoff, author of “A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal”.

The opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, doesn’t go as far as outright banning the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, but it does take a much narrower interpretation of what the EPA is authorized to do under the Clean Air Act. Previous courts found that greenhouse gases fit within the act’s definition of “air pollutants,” which the EPA is tasked with regulating. The act was passed in the 1970s before climate change had become a major policy concern, and the court previously found the act flexible enough for the EPA to regulate what lawmakers hadn’t specifically anticipated at the time.

The legal justification used to overturn the precedent was developed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who Sen. Susan Collins played a pivotal role in seating on the bench — during his 12 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

In the lower court, Kavanaugh voted in a number of cases to limit the regulatory power of the EPA, citing the “major questions doctrine,” which he says prevents a federal agency from regulating something “major” unless it has specifically been ordered to by an act of Congress.

In her dissenting opinion, however, liberal Justice Elena Kagan noted that the “major questions doctrine” is made up. “The majority claims it is just following precedent, but that is not so,” she writes. “The Court has never even used the term ‘major questions doctrine’ before.”

On top of kneecapping the EPA, the decision has broader implications for curtailing the authority of the executive branch.

“Like many recently invented doctrines beloved by the court’s conservatives, the major-questions doctrine is infinitely flexible. Where’s the line between a major question and a minor question? Wherever the conservative majority wants to draw it,” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman wrote. “In practice, the court’s conservatives can just forbid agencies from carrying out any regulatory activity they don’t like, on the grounds that it’s too ‘major.’”

He continued, “This is part of a project conservatives call the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,’ dismantling the government’s ability to protect citizens and solve problems.”

The decision could also make it harder to pass sweeping legislation like the Affordable Care Care, which was laid out in broad strokes by Congress, leaving many of the technical details to the federal agencies in charge of implementing the health care reform.

Executive action has also been used by Democratic and Republican administrations as a way to bypass gridlock in Congress, where the Senate’s anti-democratic filibuster rule currently makes most meaningful legislation impossible.

Rather than feeling powerlessness to effect change at the federal level, Wright said the court’s decision will allow climate activists to see more clearly the vested interests that lie in the way of bold environmental policies.

“The Supreme Court has an incredible amount of power and influence in the U.S.,” she said. “But there’s other tools that we can use, including state policy. That’s where we’ve seen a lot of climate action in the last couple of years and some true leadership.”

Wright said law and policy is just one tool for creating change and explained that this moment calls for deeper movement building.

“This is also a call for solidarity and intersectionality as we move forward,” she said. “This isn’t just the EPA ruling. It’s the Roe ruling. It’s the gun legislation ruling. It’s so many things. I think we can’t allow our movements to be siloed into these single-issue areas. They’re all interconnected.”

_{Maine Beacon, June 30, 2022, https://mainebeacon.com/}

Maine Poor People’s Campaign mobilizes for national ‘Moral March on Washington’ in June / by Evan Popp

_{^{Photo: A day of action organized by the Maine Poor People’s Campaign in Bangor in 2021 | Photo courtesy of Maine Poor People’s Campaign via Facebook}}

Mainers from across the state will travel to Washington, D.C., next month as part of a march to demand that those in power stop ignoring the 140 million poor and low-income people living in the U.S and work with them on a moral agenda of justice and equality.

The event, called the “Moral March on Washington & to the Polls,” will take place June 18 at 9 a.m. in the nation’s capital. The rally is being organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, a national coalition building power across marginalized communities to change the moral narrative in the U.S. and demand an end to a series of interconnected injustices. The organization is based on a campaign of the same name created by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the 1960s to unite poor and impacted people around the country.

In Maine, the state chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign is mobilizing to bring hundreds of people down to D.C. to participate in the June march.

“There’s going to be impacted speakers from across the country,” Joshua Kauppila, a Bangor-based organizer working with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said of the event. “We’re going to be lifting our moral agenda up to those down in D.C., and really highlighting how these interlocking injustices of systemic poverty, systemic racism, militarism, the war economy, ecological devastation and that distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism are all part of the problem that we need to solve and that those solutions need to come from poor people.”

Kauppila said the event will feature speeches, music and cultural arts, and a voter registration drive as well as the opportunity for people across the nation to connect over shared issues of injustice.

“We’re facing just crisis after crisis and … poor and low-income people are so often shoved aside,” Kauppila said.

Along with building power through community connections and solidarity, Kauppila said the event will also serve as a way to advocate for the policy priorities the Poor People’s Campaign is pushing for. Some of those political goals include comprehensive COVID-19 relief that prioritizes essential workers and marginalized populations, quality health care for all, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and universal guaranteed housing.

Traveling to D.C.

Kauppila said the Maine Poor People’s Campaign is working with the bus share system rally.co to get people down to D.C. for the event. According to that site, there will be bus pickup locations in Auburn, Augusta, Bangor, Dover-Foxcroft, Lewiston, Portland and Waterville in the evening on Friday, June 17, to bring people to Washington. Kauppila said participants would return to Maine on Sunday morning, the day after the rally.

More information on the bus schedule can be found here. Information on how to RSVP for the event can be found here.

Kauppila said the group has raised funds to ensure that those who can’t pay for a bus ticket or other associated costs of the trip can still go, as the group wants as many low-income Mainers as possible to attend to demonstrate the potential political power of poor people.

“We recognize that group of voters has not been activated for the primary reason that their issues are not being addressed and the politicians who claim to promote their issues don’t follow through,” Kauppila said.

Marcella Makinen, treasurer for the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, added that the mass gathering in D.C. has the potential to be transformative in terms of demonstrating the reality of a U.S. system in which inequality has continued to skyrocket.

“It’s important to be changing the narrative on why people don’t have enough resources to eat and don’t have enough resources to pay their rent. It’s too easy to blame oneself and then that leads to depression,” Makinen said, arguing that “discovering that there’s a system where rich people get richer for not doing anything can be really liberating in and of itself.”

Willie Hurley, another organizer with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said he hopes the June rally will help connect disparate grassroots campaigns together in a shared push for justice.

“We have all these separate tiny little movements and organizations all working on their different things. This is an opportunity to bring all those things together,” Hurley said. “It’s 40 percent of the country, poor people. It’s the sleeping giant.”

_{Maine Beacon, May 11 2022, https://mainebeacon.com/}